Want to work on your coding chops, but get away from the slavery of your desk and your laptop? Want to stretch out on the couch – or the cramped confines of a bus or coach plane flight? (Hello, EasyJet!)

We saw yesterday how you can work with your iPad and Processing, via Processing.js.

Here’s another option. GLSL Studio, a tool which was already a fun way to play around with 3D coding, continues to grow. It’s a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 coding environment, running on … well, a full-blown OpenGL ES 2.0 3D platform, all in a wafer-thin tablet known as the iPad.

And while it’s a little more primitive, there’s an option for Android, too, called Shader Toy. That, in turn, is inspired by a Web version, too. I’m grabbing all of them, I think, until I get my head around GLSL.

What’s GLSL, you ask? Why, it’s the omni-platform OpenGL coding language that allows you to do elaborate graphical math in real-time. It’s the secret sauce behind all the beautiful 2D and 3D pixel and model and video eye candy you see on modern computing platforms. It’s perfect for this environment, because you often write very little actual code, code that goes a long way. Now you can contemplate just what you’re trying anywhere you like.

What can you do with GLSL Studio? How about:

• Native code editing and data generation, with graphical management for shared attributes, uniforms, vertices – all the variables that make the things work.
• Texture management which will even integrate with your Photo Roll and (for devices that have them) camera.
• Example programs from pixels to 3D.
• Real-time controls using touch, motion, and your screen dimensions. Various render modes, too.
• Shader export so you can sketch shaders on the go, then add them to your desktop development environment when you’re back at your desk.

New in this version:

• A custom keyboard with arrow keys and coding shortcuts (essential to make you miss your physical keyboard less when coding)
• Light/dark syntax themes (finally, use comfortably in low light)
• Auto-indentation

Even the iPhone 3GS and iPod touch 4th-generation are supported, in addition to any iPad, so if you can get a discarded used model, you’ve got an instant GLSL learning toy.

http://glslstudio.com/
Via the developer’s kode80 blog

Other Platforms

Don’t have an iToy? Here are a few other options.

ShaderToy is a free tool for coding shaders. There may be other options on Android now, but this was the one I was able to find, and supports both vertex shaders and fragment shaders.

ShaderToy for Android [blog post]

ShaderToy for Android [AndroidZoom download]

The Android app was inspired by the ridiculously-awesome, WebGL-powered ShaderToy for modern browsers:
http://www.iquilezles.org/apps/shadertoy/

And among many lovely desktop debug tools, here’s an excellent option for Linux users:
glslDevil

Magical Coding Platforms

I still see people pulling their hair out over the fact that early on, people complained that the iPad was a “consumption” device, rather than “creation.” In fairness, that’s exactly how Apple first marketed the device – before they later changed tack to show a wider, more computer-like range of functions. I don’t think anyone would imagine some day that we’d someday be writing elaborate 3D code on something this small, light, affordable, and portable. (And yes, if you don’t like the iPad, this goes for any number of amazing devices that cost under $500 – laptops and netbooks, too.)

We’ve come full circle from the days when LOGO or BASIC were the first tools you fired up on a Commodore 64 or Apple II. Again, the computer is a device on which you can explore your own ideas from scratch, using the basic powers of computation and math. What a wonderful world.

Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque Projections from Obscura Digital on Vimeo.

Illuminating the facades of United Arab Emirates mosque and historical architecture with extraordinary imagery, Obscura Digital transformed these structures with visuals both decorative and cultural. It’s a visually-rich celebration of Arabic and Emirati culture, and one of the developers – absurdly-prolific artist and geek virtuoso Barry Threw – walks us through some of the details of how it was produced, all using TouchDesigner software.

The mosque, top:

In celebration of UAE National Day 2011
Projection and design by Obscura Digital

44 projectors with a combined brightness of 840,000 lumens
were used to cover a surface 600ft wide x 351ft high

Barry explains in detail how this lavish projection project came into being – and get ready for some nerdy vocabulary, folks, which is part of why we love what we do:

All of the mapping is done with TouchDesigner.

The first step in the pipeline is getting some sort of model of the structure involved. In this instance, we used a laser scanner to output a 3d point cloud of the building. This point cloud then needs to be turned into a mesh, and then we re-topologize it into a simpler mesh that can be easily handled in realtime. There is a high degree of skill necessary in this process.

At the same time, the physical projector locations have to be decided upon. This depends upon the actual map of the building and surrounding area, where we can get access to, and what kind of structures we are allowed to build. This particular job was easy in terms of obstructions of the surrounding area, but difficult because of the sacred nature of the site. All of our projector towers had to be well designed with facades to match the mosque architecture.

The projector placement and physical production aspects are a behemoth tasks in themselves. Number and placement of projectors has many variables, but in general, maximum brightness, full area coverage and optimal resolution are the major ones.

The art design process is another concurrent pipeline. After the 3d model and general projector spec’ing is complete, a template can be made to render the content, which has previously been put through an extensive creative process. This is output as video, in our case using a currently-proprietary codec called FireFrame, which are then textured onto the 3d model.

Projector calibration is basically a two-step process.

We typically use stacks of projectors to achieve higher lumens over the projected area. So the first stage is converging stacks of projectors to make a single, clear image.

Secondly, physical projector extrinsics must be calculated to match a virtual camera in our 3D world. We are currently using a technique that I’m lovingly referring to as “Sain-O’Neill Extrinsic Trilateration,” or SONET. Basically, it involves triangulating the projector and projection centroid placements based on other known onsite architectural features.

This gets you fairly close with careful application, but a number of post-3D and 2D transformations are used on the geometry to account for the fallible nature of the physical world to which we are chained. There is also a separate group of procedures that are used in the instances where a blend between two channels are necessary, and the one that we use is dependent on the architecture.

Equipment used / number and types of projectors / lumens / power:
44 projectors on the mosque (24 x 20K lumens + 20 18K lumens) = 840,000 lumens
5 projectors on the fort (5 x 20K lumens) = 100,000 lumens
940,000 lumens total
49 projectors x 3.2kW x 60 hours = 9,400kW total show (Mosque and Fort)

CO2 Offsetting plan:
9,400kW = 12,878 lbs of CO2 = 6 tons of CO2
(1.37 pounds CO2 per kW / 2204 pounds = 1 ton of CO2)
6 tons x 5 trees per ton = 30 trees
Equipment rigs:
Custom-built projector enclosures based on floral designs that match the mosque

Architectural mapping / scanning components:
Obscura laser scanned the surface area of the mosque to generate 3D models.
Incredibly complex geometry: flat walls with intricate hand carved details (all mapped); arcades with rows of columns; domes ranging in size from the “small” 7m ones on the sides of the main gate to the 37 and 46m main domes of the prayer hall; all four of the 107m minarets.

I’d like to mention Dorian Orange (http://www.dorianorange.com/), a NY based shop who helped us immeasurably with the media on this project.

More information:

http://obscuradigital.com/
http://www.derivative.ca/ [developers of TouchDesigner]
UAE National Day Grand Mosque Architectural Projection Mapping [barry threw blog]
UAE National Day Fort Al Jahili Architectural Projection Mapping [barry threw blog]

A massive team worked on the project. Credits:

Technical Direction
Andrew Plourde
Eugene Dowlen
Simon Ransom (theRansoms)

Creative Direction / Media
Travis Threlkel
Marta Salas Porras
Ron Robinson
Nathaniel Ruhlman (Dorian Orange)

Production
Gaston Albanell
Nick Lynch
Diego Novoa
Rainen Janes
Joe Vigorito
Nathan Houchin
Eric Knuble

Interactive Development
Mary Franck
Grady Sain
Imran Nabhan

IT
Sean Holt

Photos / Documentation
Josh Brott
Block IPDelete

We’ve seen fairly impressive work involving people waving their arms around at cameras, but at the end of the day, you still have people … waving their arms around at cameras.

In a refreshingly different take, the world of the game Mimicry is the “ultimate sandbox game” – set in a literal sandbox. Participants manipulate piles of real sand, as Kinect-powered cameras track their work and project imagery onto the sand from a rendered analog version of the same world. The player mimics the virtual, the virtual mimics the player, and the stuff of each fuse in a real/virtual hybrid in sand.

All of this really is a game – and the imaginative blurring of tangible and intangible is simply magical, as digital waves lap against sandbox shorelines shaped by your hands. (Magrathea, anyone?)

From the press release, more details:

Monobanda has created a sandbox game with real sand, in which up to four players at a time control a ball that can roll around, jump and glide through the Mimicry world. Tiny virtual characters roll around in the sandbox. You can build obstacles for them or create a racetrack.

Rules do not exist, there is no point system. This means you create your own games. According to the makers, the game can be compared to a schoolyard, and is best described as a digital sandbox. The environment in which you play exists in both the virtual and the physical world: a landscape is projected on real sand.

Monobanda’s Simon van der Linden says: “With Project Mimicry we are researching the magic of play.” About the title: “Mimicry is another word for mirroring behavior and looks. When people imitate each other, playful situations automatically emerge.”

Within the sandbox you create your own world. When you make a mountain of sand, this mountain also appears in the digital world. When the mountain is high enough, snow appears on its peak. And if you want a fresh country lake just dig a hole.

And, of course, there’s this obligatory line:

Simon: “We have only scratched the surface of what is possible with Mimicry, and we are looking for companies who are interested in exploring those possibilities with us.”

It strikes me that, with a technology that began somewhat clumsily allowing basic gestures and movement, the underlying capabilities of Kinect and similar 3D sensing systems may be in shaping worlds. All of the most compelling applications we’ve seen thus far have moved in that direction, which more than hand-waving could ever hope, begin to realize designs that represent ubiquitous computing.

I hope we get to see more of this project and others like it. And it’s nice to see this work whilst I’m here in the Netherlands, home of the project. Thanks to another Dutch visual lover for the tip – reader Job Jutten.

http://mimicry.monobanda.nl/

Developed by Monobanda
Supported by Gamefonds
Powered by Cannibal

With projected mapped to more than just the cinema-style plane, and now smarter integrated sensing and vision applications like Microsoft’s Kinect, all sorts of surfaces can come alive. It transforms projection from something cinematic to an interactive, dynamic part of the space.

So, while this project isn’t new (both videos were released last year), it’s worth revisiting the work of Augmented Engineering. Researchers at the University of Illinois, Brett Jones and Rajinder Sodhi have a resume that includes Walt Disney Imagineering. That work is even more promising-looking, though, having seen this week the efforts to build cross-platform mapping and interaction frameworks and work with voxels to make dynamic, augmented 3D spaces.

And it all means this could soon be a full-blown artistic medium, not just a research project – particularly when a VJ can go to a local GameStop and buy a Kinect for less than the cost of a projector bulb.

In the video at top:

ISMAR 2010 – Best Student Paper Award (ismar10.org)

We present a novel way of interacting with everyday objects by representing content as interactive surface particles. Users can build their own physical world, map virtual content onto their physical construction and play directly with the surface using a stylus. A surface particle representation allows programmed content to be created independent of the display object and to be reused on many surfaces. We demonstrated this idea through a projector-camera system that acquires the object geometry and enables direct interaction through an IR tracked stylus. We present three motivating example applications, each displayed on three example surfaces. We discuss a set of interaction techniques that show possible avenues for structuring interaction on complicated everyday objects, such as Surface Adaptive GUIs for menu selection. Through an informal evaluation and interviews with end users, we demonstrate the potential of interacting with surface particles and identify improvements necessary to make this interaction practical on everyday surfaces.

Paper: brettrjones.com/​data/​SIE.pdf

As with the work we saw earlier this week, the team has also experimented with adding Kinect to the mix (relevant not only to Kinect but any similar sensing/vision scenario):

A Kinect-projector visualization where distances from the Kinect sensor are visualized through colors (blue=close and red=far). The Kinect sensor and a standard projector are calibrated using the Projector-Camera Calibration Library (an open-source project to be released soon).

Via comments on the first video, some more interesting work – like mapping projections onto a clay model, in this case modeling soil erosion, though that’s hardly the only application.

Working with Tangible GIS

The blog hasn’t seen an update since January, but maybe we’ll get their attention:
http://augmentedengineering.wordpress.com/

And if all of this makes you want to start playing with toys, you’re in luck — I love this Kinect + LEGO research, as linked from the Augmented Engineering blog:

The work is a project of Intel Labs Seattle and the University of Washington. Combining vision, robotics, and human-computer interaction experts, they’re investigating all kinds of good stuff. They describe this work thusly:

OASIS is a flexible software architecture that enables us to prototype applications that use depth cameras and underlying computer vision algorithms to recognize and track objects and gestures, combined with interactive projection. Here we show OASIS in an interactive Lego playing scenario.

Ah, digital geometry: as if caught eternally in a sterile, detail-less vacuum, the problem with virtual models can be that they’re too perfect, too abstract. So, following on the use of model kitbashing techniques to make more convincing graphics in the game Hawken, as we saw this week, here’s more on the idea.

Wikipedia (somewhat surprisingly) has a great article on the use of “greebles” to make (physical) models look less bare. Model-makers, whether working with physical models or virtual, run into the same problem – and can employ the same solution. It’d be doing a disservice to their art, perhaps, to say they fix the issue by “gluing a lot of junk to bare surfaces,” but that’s the basic idea.

What’s significant is not only that these provide realism by adding detail or making things look rougher, but that they add a sense of scale. And that’s perhaps the biggest issue with looking at virtual models: there’s nothing against which one can find scale. The expert model maker is partly able to make their work convincing by the deft use of forced proportion.

The timeline of the technique, as related to the use of a word for it, anyway:

1968: The modeling team for Kubrick’s 2001 knew something about real spaceships – especially with NASA veterans Fred Ordway and Harry Lange onboard, who had worked with Werner Von Braun. (Lange went on to work on the Star Wars trilogy.) The word for the use of the surface details: “wiggets”.

1977: Star Wars comes on the scene, covered in kit-bashed parts. To make ships look realistic, bare surfaces are festooned with pieces of model kits and even the odd plastic soldier – anything to break up the flat planes. Allegedly, Industrial Light and Magic model-makers coin the term “greebles” (or “greeblies”). You can read a superb 1993 Wired articl,e probing the depths of technique, modeling, and philosophy, by Rudy Rucker:
Use Your Illusion: Kit-bashing the cosmic matte. (Issue 4!)

As ILM’s Don Bies tells Wired:

We include a lot of pieces from standard model kits. See that there, it’s the conning tower of a submarine, and here’s the hull of a destroyer ship, and this down here is the front of a jet plane, and up here is part of a helicopter.

And in that story, skin textures, too, were a subject of digital manipulation, as ILM took on the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park:

As a final touch, the skin textures were lightly roughened with computer- generated chaos to give them the indefinable level of detail that characterizes real-world images.

In a sign of this coming in circles, while Rucker had interviewed ILM in the 70s, they used the term “kit-bash” – which comes from conventional modeling, not special effects per se. The aforementioned Wikipedia article was brought to his attention by legendary futurist Bruce Sterling. And he looks to:

1950s: Allen Ginsberg describes the perceptual impact of moving between contrasting colors as being an “Eyeball Kick.” (That suggests all sorts of digital possibilities beyond just adding three-dimensional details to models, kit-bash style.)

Rucker also has a brilliant set of notes for a planned keynote at San Francisco’s experimental sex and art conference, Arse Elektronika (not a typo):
Sex and Greebles
– and he wonders, brilliantly, “would sex even be possible without greebles?”

1990s: Ron Thornton of the pioneering CG firm Foundation Imaging (Amiga-powered, as I recall!) called their translation of the greeblies to digital models “nurnies.” So says, at least, Charles Adams, who brought the same aesthetic and techniques to the 2004 (all-CG) Battlestar Galactica.

In terms of how this might apply to digital models, I’ll close with thoughts from Rucker:

You can write programs to procedurally decorate any surface with greebles; it’s a process similar to fractalization, that is, you divide up the surface into square are triangles and randomly add a bump or a hollow here and there. If you like, you can do this recursively for several levels, that is, rather than adding a bump or a hollow to a square, you subdivide the square into yet smaller squares and greeble those tiny squares.

Now, there are plug-ins for the task, and I’m sure any number of possible shaders. But I rather like the idea of each artist reinventing the solution – much in the way that there are plenty of different ways to glue a bunch of spare plastic model parts to a piece of plywood.

What will you greeble? I’ll be curious to see. Great visuals can, perhaps, even be better than sex.

The craft of photorealistic gaming has risen to astounding heights, but look-alike art direction can overshadow its technical achievement. Not so with an extraordinary-looking indie title called Hawken. The mech combat first-person shooter, built in the Unreal Engine, is crafted in a way that speaks to the possibilities of digital technique to spin imaginary worlds, and to build integrated aesthetics.

As Technical Lead Jon Kreuzer told PC Gamer, the nine-person LA studio reused components to construct the world of the game: “Many parts of the levels are created by combining re-usable building blocks into unique structures, which can allow new levels to come together quickly.” The results saved time, but the patchwork quilt of textures and modules also helps create a convincing aesthetic order to the title, an eye-popping, recursive detailed quality.

The inspiration for the technique comes not from digital media, however, but from good, old-fashioned model making. Team leader Khang Le told Kotaku:

It’s a kitbash design sense that been around since the first Star Wars movie. Getting random parts of airplanes, ship models and just bashing them to create something strange and weird. These days you can do that in a 3D program and I just love that organic process.

Kitbash may sound like, erm, the first thing that happened when you tried to put together a model airplane. (There’s a reason I didn’t wind up in the model-making business. Peter bash! Peter smash! Peter … get plastic cement stuck to his fingers.) But it actually refers to the technique of reusing stock model kit components to produce a realistic model of something else, by combining kits of parts. You literally dump out parts from multiple kits and keep combining until you get what you want, emphasizing getting the look right over using components that literally represent a certain function. That is, you could very well use a drain pipe from a house to get a realistic-looking spaceship hydraulic if you wanted – or any number of variations.

In digital modeling, this is a really suggestive technique that could be used for just about anything, from first person shooters to experimental generative graphics. The idea is, rather than create the specific thing you need, create variations based on a core language of reusable components. It happens to be entirely accidental that this story follows one on Brian Eno and generative visuals, but the two are closely related. Of course, it’s good to have some background in physical model building, because then you’ve had the sensation of messing around with little plastic bits, and the whole abstraction becomes more real.

The title is still in production, but a new gameplay video debuted this week – seen at top. If you follow the world of gaming, you probably already know that, but if you don’t – or if the brilliant stuff like this gets lost in the dreck of the industry – it’s worth seeing.

Bellow, the trailer that first turned heads in the gaming world.

Check out the game, and try to work out how you’ll sit on your hands until it’s out:
http://www.hawkengame.com

Pd and GEM, the free software cousins to Max/MSP and Jitter, are already known for visual programming via patching, but mainly for manipulating sound and video textures. Here, we see an entire 3D engine rendered, incredibly, as a series of patching objects. We saw a first look at what it could do last month:

Truly Outrageous: An Entire 3D Game Engine, Built in Pd and GEM

Well, now you can download the patches for yourself and have a look; see the walkthrough tutorial at top. And – wow, it’s more powerful than I even understood when I first saw it (and I was already pretty blown away). Creator Sebastian Pirch explains his creation (copied here unedited):

It employs 3D navigation like you know it from 3D Programms like 3Ds Max or others in GEM, Pd’s OpenGL engine.
It enables you to navigate in 3d space using your mouse, or other input devices. It provides objects to select and move things in space among many other useful little tools for creating your interactive realtime 3d scenes within Pd.

There is also a bunch of MaxScripts, that export coordinate lists of any kind of animated objects from 3DsMax to Pd. By this procedure you can use motion data produced by ParticleFlow, Physics Simulations, Biped-Skeleton Animations or whatever in GEM.
If you use another 3D Programm you will have to write your own export scripts, which shouldnt be hard to do. IF YOU SUCCEED please let me know, so i can include them in the package. I’d also be glad to hear your experiences with it, just drop me a mail sonsofsol@gmx.net

Sebastian also makes a good explanation of why he chose Pd: the ability to use multiple monitors (he got up to nine!), flexible support for input from devices like the Wii controller, MIDI devices, Arduino and sensors, and video tracking, multichannel audio, and all the other things Pd can do.

Download and blog post: GEM-Engine 1.0 released! [3rdeyeanimation]

Thanks, yet again, to Philip Cunningham via Twitter for the tip.

We got to once again enjoy the work of Beeple aka Mike Winkelmann this week with his Instrument Video Nine, featuring a new batch of 3D sound-making robots. The work landed him on the top of Vimeo, and rightfully so. Mike now shares some of his work flow

All the (wonderful, hand-rawn) pictures by Mike Winkelmann. The robots video at bottom.

Tools used:

Video: Cinema 4D, After Effects, Flash, Vegas, Fireworks
Audio: FL Studio, Vegas

What was the workflow like?
A lot of people ask what came first, the music or the video. They really sort of came out of a back and forth process. Sometimes, I’d first model something like a mechanical arm. And then I’d find a sound that kind of fit it. Then I’d sort of fit it into the music and finally animate it. Then I’d kind of go back and maybe tweak the sound or tweak the instrument as need. Other times I’d start with a sound that I really liked and figure out what I can model that might look like it makes that sound.
After the 3D animation was done, then I did post production work in After Effects which was new to me. Subprime was pretty much a straight render with very little even color correction. So learning how to do more of a proper post production was also a challenge.

How were the audio and video synced?
In terms of how the audio and video were synced, this was mostly the “brute force” way. When I first started out, I tried to use some of the built in tools in Cinema 4D to sync sound and animation, but found them to be a bit too simplified for what I was look for.. I am still too new to 3D animation to understand much of the scripting language in Cinema 4D which I no doubt could have used to automate this process. That combined with zero knowledge of MIDI really limited my options to just sort of buckling down and busting this motha out the only way I knew how… a whole lot of keyframes. This was definitely quite tedious but because the timeline is so well laid out in Cinema 4D, it really wasn’t too bad.

What was your inspiration for the piece?
I really just wanted to make some sort of glitched out, futuristic, infographicy, 3D mechanical robot thing that was perfectly synced to music. I also wanted to it be much, much ‘darker’ than subprime. Early on in the making of it, I saw this video by New Judas that I absolutely fucking love. http://vimeo.com/764015 I also really like some of the infographic stuff that has been going around, obviously the Royksopp piece and the Feltron project http://feltron.com/. I wish I could have done a better job with that piece of it, but that was done towards the end of the project and by then I was pretty well spent on ‘er.

Did the “cult” success of your earlier pieces get you work which allowed you to put together more detailed projects?

My commercial work and my personal work are VERY seperate. My day job is a graphic designer for a very, very small IT firm, where I am the only designer. I do mostly web design for pretty reserved corporate sites that leaves very little room for too much creativity. Thus the need for my personal work where I can blow off a little steam The videos I am doing now is the result of having more patience putting together more involved pieces and also actually having learned the tools needed to put together more involved pieces. But yeah, my personal work is my personal work, I’ve made very, very little money from it and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Jaymis Loveday contributed to this story.

instrumental video nine from beeple on Vimeo.

Shuttle, the compact PC folks, have posted a step-by-step walkthrough demonstrating how artists model the Viper fighter craft for the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. (That might seem like odd timing, but Sci Fi Channel — now SyFy — continues to crank out spinoffs of the show, so there’s plenty of modeling work to be done.)

What’s nice about the video is seeing how much of the workflow is now becoming real-time. That illustrates how the long-awaited convergence between traditional modeling and effects and live visuals is finally coming to pass. As three-dimensional design becomes more about “right now” and less about “tinker, tinker, wait, wait, wait, render, render,” the notion of visuals as live instrument is no longer so strange. It means that the VJ and visual performance community has growing common ground, even with elements like special effects.

Also remarkable: all of this is done on a compact, small form-factor Shuttle PC. Usually, compact PCs have been associated with significant performance trade-offs, but that’s changing, as well. The Core i7 is showing up in laptops, and smaller size, lower heat, and lower power consumption are the order of the day.

The animators behind the show are interesting, too. Effects consultants Tim Albee and Kelly Lee Myers are the ones contributing here, and to the Galactica universe in general; Tim is a superstar independent artist with his own production company, and Kelly aka “Kat” moonlights as a trance DJ. (Hey, you have to listen to something to keep you awake during long visual effects production sessions!)

The software appears to be NewTek LightWave, continuing a long-standing tradition between NewTek and sci-fi. The ground-breaking Babylon 5 was made quick and on-the-cheap using NewTek’s Video Toaster on the Commodore Amiga. (See a 1994 making-of story, for starters.) That show heralded the future of science fiction effects, producing loads of ship shots that would have otherwise been impossible on a budget with traditional real-for-real models.

Blender, the insanely-powerful free 3D modeling software (and compositing software, and animation software, and game engine) is finally coming of age. And with it, so, too, are some of its plug-ins. Witness the sophistication of Pyppet, a “digital puppetry” plug-in for Blender. It allows you to take 3D models you’ve created and “perform” them in real-time using a variety of inputs, including the lowly mouse, gamepads, microphone audio input, and even the Nintendo Wii remote.

In case you’re not a talented 3D character modeler (cough, okay, as I certainly am not), you’ll be especially interested as visualists in the addition of video playback via VLC. That could make Pyppet a VJ tool. In 3D.

That starts to put Pyppet along another entirely free and open source tool, Animata. Animata focused more on 2.5-D animation and simple skeletons – which, for some tasks at least, I expect makes Animata the easier of these two tools! Still, for those of you tired of watching VJ video loops played through kaleidoscope filters… (Wow! A silhouette of like, a dancing lady!) The future is beautiful.

We’re working on chatting with folks in the Blender community to get better documentation and tutorials here on CDM, as Blender I know can be an imposing package. Volunteers welcome. But the timing couldn’t be better: as the Blender folks polish off the major 2.5 milestone, we have the most usable, powerful version of Blender yet just around the corner. If you’ve put off learning this tool, now could be the time.

For more on Pyppet:
http://pyppet.blogspot.com/

Pyppet for Blender Update [Blender Nation]

Thanks, Giorgio, for the tip!